Royal Canadian Mounted Police constables Aaron Kehler and K.P. Sidhu had now searched the truck, read him his Charter rights and Kehler was asking him why, if he had been poaching deer with a friend as he claimed, the knife on his multi-tool Leatherman and a pipe wrench had blood on them.

Legebokoff told him, he said, the friend had shot the deer, but it ran off, so they tracked it down.

“He said they took turns clubbing it (the alleged deer) to death” with the knife and wrench, Kehler told B.C. Supreme Court Justice Glen Parrett and the jurors at Legebokoff’s multiple murder trial.

Kehler inquired if he did a lot of poaching, and Legebokoff replied, “Yeah, I’m a redneck. That’s what we do for fun.”

Defence lawyer James Heller, defence lawyer for Cody Legebokoff speaks to media on the steps of the Prince George Law Courts on Tuesday June 3, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Prince George Citizen-Brent Braaten

He also explained the blood on his shoes by saying he’d killed a few grouse in the bush.

Alas for Legebokoff, there were no flies on Kehler, who wasn’t buying what he was selling.

By this point, the two officers had seen the blood smear on Legebokoff’s chin, the blood on his legs (he was wearing shorts) in a spackle pattern, the pool of bloody liquid on the driver’s side floor mat and what Kehler believed was an open beer can.

That gave him grounds to do a Liquor Control Licence Act search.

That, in turn, led to a pat-down of Legebokoff and the discovery in a pocket of the bloody multi-tool Leatherman, covered with a sort of gelled blood, and in the vehicle search, a monkey backpack on the passenger seat (“I immediately didn’t believe this was his property”), a checkered wallet and in it a children’s hospital card in the name of Loren Leslie, some half-drunk bottles of the liqueur-type drinks favoured by teenage girls, the pipe wrench covered in bloodied clumps of snow, Brillo pad sponges (significant to the officer because he knew they’re used as filters in crack pipes), a couple of used wire filters (also used for crack smoking) and, in the centre console of the truck, two crack pipes.

As Kehler put it, “The purpose of the search has shifted, the investigation has shifted.”

Legebokoff is the young man accused of murdering Leslie, who was 15, and three adult women, Natasha Montgomery, a 23-year-old mother of two, and Jill Stuchenko and Cynthia Frances Maas, both 35 and mothers.

All three adults were also cocaine users and, Crown prosecutor Joseph Temple said in his opening statement, involved in the sex trade.

But it was this roadside stop that started the ball rolling.

Legebokoff was arrested that night under the Wildlife Act for poaching, but in short order, the conservation officer requested by this smart young officer had followed the tire tracks into the bush and discovered Leslie’s body. Legebokoff was charged with murder.

Only later was he allegedly linked by DNA to the deaths of the three women, even Montgomery, whose body has never been found.

Kehler had been making his way down Highway 27 that night from Fort St. James to Vanderhoof. He was doing a mitzvah, driving a purse from the Fort St. James detachment to a halfway point on the highway where K.P. Sidhu, from the Vanderhoof detachment, would meet him and take the purse. It belonged to a woman whose vehicle had hit a moose and careered into a ditch; she’d been taken to hospital, and a Good Samaritan had picked it up and dropped it off.

It was a dark, cold, early winter’s night.

The young officer was cresting a hill when he spotted headlights — at first, he guessed it was a snowmobile — bobbing through the forest off to his left, heading toward the road. Soon, he saw it was a truck and noticed it didn’t slow down as it entered the highway.

At that point, he had all of a year and a week on the job, but his spidey senses were well-developed and he was hearing them.

“I started following (the truck),” he said. “Something was odd. I felt it, inside I knew something was not right.”

But he also had lawful grounds to stop it.

While Kehler didn’t have radar, he paced the truck and guesstimated it was speeding.

Roadside stops are high-risk, particularly on a pitch-black isolated highway in the middle of nowhere. He alerted Sidhu that he wanted to stop the truck, but would wait until they crossed paths.

By this time in his fledgling career, Kehler already done about 100 roadside stops. He’d never before seen what happened after Legebokoff pulled over. The driver had his registration and licence in his hand, and his hand was sticking out the window.

He shouted out a greeting and approached the driver.

Legebokoff must have thought he hit all the right notes in his conversation with the officer: He painted himself as a good ole Northern boy, he’d admitted to the poaching; why, he’d been checking out a hunting area on the logging road just before the police stopped him.

At one point, Kehler told him he was young, too, of the same age. Now was the time for him to come clean.

You know, he told him, “when you’re taking turns clubbing a deer to death,” that can lead to becoming a serial killer.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile